Three years on from his Bafta-winning film This is England, Shane Meadows has breathed life into his characters again – for the small screen. They've been growing up, in real time. Or in parallel real time in the past, because we've moved on from 1983 to This is England '86 (Channel 4). Somewhere, a long way away, a World Cup is going on.

There's a lot more hair about the place. Woody seems to have gone from skinhead to mod and even has a job, which is more than most people had in 1986. He's still with Lol (poor Lol – unaware that in 20 years or so her name will become an irritating acronym people use on something called the internet). They are getting married, though it kind of falls apart at the last hurdle, Woody frozen at "I do". Meggy doesn't help by having a heart attack in the loo of the scuzzy register office.

Shaun, peripheral to the gang, is just leaving school, cast adrift into the grey doldrums of mid-80s Britain. I don't think his exam results are going to be doing him any favours. Life is crap, but it's OK if you've got mates – that's one of the messages going on here. Shaun's problem is that he doesn't have mates at the minute. Or a job. Or a scooter. Or anything much, except for a bleeding head from a cut above his eye. I hope for his sake he's readopted by the others. They're better off – they have each other, at least. "I fookin' luv yer I do" they say to each other, and then toast their love with a can or a cuddle.

This doesn't have the skinhead culture focus of the movie. Or the hard edge – yet. There are three more episodes, so this may come later with the reintroduction of Combo. Remember, the racist one? But it's still bleak, as you'd expect. At times touching, at others funny. I like Gadget stealing the flowers for the wedding from a mourner at the cemetery. And Meggy, recovering in hospital, using his piss bag for the I-fookin'-luv-you-all toast because he hasn't got a can. A wheelchair race is less funny and goes on too long. Sometimes I get the impression the actors are just told to get into character and to get on with it. There's a certain lack of direction – both the sort that directors do, and the sort that indicates where something is going. But I don't think that true Meadows fans will be disappointed.

Things are different now. You don't just mess up your GCSEs, then open a can and drift about in life. You need to get going young, as demonstrated in The Big School Lottery (BBC2), a terrifying documentary about the battle to get into the best secondary schools in Birmingham. For the top schools, the competition is fiercer than fierce. "There's like so many girls who want it like badder than me, they're like desperate to go," says young Saffiyah. Saffiyah wants to go to a grammar school, ironically. Actually, I think Saffiyah's going to be all right – her creative writing work is outstanding; she shouldn't have any trouble getting into one of the gooder places. Ethan wants to go to a grammar school, too, so he's been doing some practice 11-plus exams. "They're quite hard to understand unless you get teached properly," he says. I feel less confident about Ethan.

Best value of all is a scary lady called Julie Newbold, who is head of admissions for the local education authority. The futures of 15,000 Birmingham children rest in Julie's hands. Her role is to manage expectations, which I think is a euphemism for disappointing people.

Julie's good at euphemisms. Part of her job involves finding out who's trying to cheat the system by pretending to live somewhere they don't. They rent a small place near the school they want to go to, in order to have an address in the catchment area. So Julie pays them surprise home visits, early in the morning or late at night. She doesn't see it as policing – not trying to catch the cheats, but being more of a service to them: "to help families, to help them to be able to establish that's where their child is actually living," she says. And then she reiterates it. "As I say, this is to help them to identify where they're living."

It must be tough for parents, remembering where they and their children live. Thank heaven, then, for Julie, who's on hand to help.